Everyone I know in linguistics uses the LINGUIST List website to a greater or lesser degree. Linguist List began as a mailing list in the 90’s, with book, job, and dissertation announcements, call-for-papers, and general academic discussions.

Nowadays many people follow the various announcements on Linguist List using an RSS feed reader such as Google Reader or my personal favorite NetNewsWire.

Unfortunately, the Linguist List RSS feeds (at least recently) don’t include the full text of the articles and have a few other quirks as well. It’s often hard to judge based on the title whether it’s really something I’m interested or not, so I’ve spent a lot of time frustratedly opening any possibly interesting-looking entry in a separate NetNewsWire tab. Today I decided enough was enough: I just wrote a script which parses each of the Linguist List RSS feeds, finds the actual descriptions and interleaves them.¹ It’s working remarkably well so far:

Here are all the RSS links for all of you to subscribe to. I plan on keeping this up and maintained for the foreseeable future (or, until Linguist List improves their own RSS feeds!) so feel free to subscribe to it. Please do let me know if you run into any issues or have a suggestion.

Most recent issues
All (announcements)
Book announcements
Call for papers
Conference announcements
Discussions
Dissertation announcements
FYI
Job announcements
Topics in the Media
Queries
Book reviews
Software announcements
Summaries of Query Responses
Support for Students

You can find descriptions of the content of each of these feeds on Linguist List’s RSS feeds page.

Perhaps in the future I’ll do a “how to” post as well with the code I use to make this happen. I’ll note that it’s just 70 lines of PHP (including whitespace) and could no doubt be tightened up.

Related posts:

1. Automating the Linguist’s Job
2. The Hit List: Better Software Through Less UI
3. Localizing Ubiquity: an open letter to linguists

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